Cimarosa was a fine composer, with a fluent melodic gift, and this is apparent in other areas of his output. He composed some 88 keyboard sonatas during the years he spent at the court of Catherine the Great in St Petersburg (1787-91), and were probably intended as study pieces for wealthy female students at court. These short, 'Scarlatti-proportioned' sonatas reveal the melodic vein and rhythmic vitality that made Cimarosa's operas so popular. This music is not in any way influenced by Haydn's or Clementi's sonatas of the period. Cimarosa chose a simpler Neopolitan style of writing. This makes them ideally suited to the guitar as these transcriptions by Claudio Giuliani reveal.

Gramophone MagazineGiuliani's playing of his own transcriptions is infused with the same grace and elegance that characterise Cimarosa's music, while demonstrating that the sonatas gain more than they lose in being transferred to the guitar, especially in terms of tonal variety.